Slowly Going Bald

• One day, Peter Berg's gonna hold the camera still and let me see what's going on. And that will be a good day.

• To the people who clapped when Jennifer Garner shoved a knife into the back of a terrorist's skull: You scare me.

Click here for the review.

UPDATE: According to the Times Online, Peter Berg has shown some regret that the film ended so positively, or at least more bloodthirsty than some (like me) may have wanted. He said, "I do think it’s not entirely realistic. … I boxed myself into a corner. Next time that won’t happen."

Just, you know, interesting.

3:10 to Yuma

"My Boys"
[Willamette Week]

Across the Universe

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Kingdom

me: don't tase me, bro
man
kid just had a good question about kerry being in the same super-secret super-powerful club as bush
and he gets shocked
lame
Sis: seriously
i mean, he was acting stupid, but the police shouldn't have been trying to tackle him in the first place
me: yeah. maybe he could've phrased it better, been more sly, but i like the premise, you know?
skull and bones guys were like the birth of the cia
Sis: it's true
me: just a bunch of rich scary new englanders
Sis: hehe
me: with their chowder and torture
Sis: :)
pastel polo shirts and wiretapping programs
me: freaking boat shoes and international webs of secret agents
Sis: using their rowing paddles to waterboard detainees on
me: choking immigrants with those camel-hair scarves
Sis: waxing their yachts with never-used writs of habeas corpus
me: powering their homes on martha's vineyard with the failed dreams of oppressed minorities
Sis: using their silver spoons to hook up the electrical wiring on enemy combatants, who have their heads covered with letterman's sweaters
me: with their rigidly patriarchal society and their distaste for the bill of rights

me: i have a headache
i went and got ibuprofen from the first aid kit
i thought about getting cramp tabs just to see if that would help
Sis: it would
cramp tabs?
wow
they have ibuprofen in them
me: hmm
and they make me feel like a confident woman again
so, bonus
Sis: this is what i'm saying

The co-writers of 3:10 to Yuma were pretty great to oblige me with an e-mail interview. For those who haven't seen the movie yet, it's a solid, enjoyable Western.

Click here for the interview.

Ryan: you know, half our D&D group is married. i'm just saying.
me: having a tolerant wife doesn't necessarily make D&D okay. even hitler got some trim.

Sis: girls really do over-analyze too much
me: also, water is wet

I don't care what your freaking name is, Sibling, now GET IN THE FREAKING MUD.

Sorry. I have to get that out of my system every now and then.

Anyway, the movie is really, really good. Really. Great Western, great human drama, great script, great photography, and some damn fantastic acting.

Click here for the review.

I think Esquire's pick this year for Sexiest Woman Alive will be...

Charlize Theron.

The upcoming comedy Good Luck Chuck is about Chuck (Dane Cook), a guy who's seemingly cursed in relationships because every time he sleeps with a woman, she winds up leaving him for the man she's meant to marry. That's how he got his nickname: Good Luck Chuck. The title is not a statement or wish of well-being — that would be Good Luck, Chuck. But there's no comma, because the title isn't a phrase, it's the character's handle. It's important to lay all that up front because (a) I am indisputably right about this and (b) Lionsgate is apparently abandoning the film's premise for the latest round of TV trailers, despite already having aired and screened teasers that more accurately reflect the film's story.

Here's the original trailer:

Cook appears to be playing a slightly toned-down version of the hyperkinetic stage persona he's crafted over the years, which is a welcome change. But he's playing a pretty sleazy-looking womanizer, working his stubble and oddly spiked hair to his advantage while bedding a succession of women who simply want to screw him so they can move on and find their true loves. That's the basis of the conflict: Chuck meets Cam (Jessica Alba), but is afraid that when he sleeps with her, she'll leave him. Chuck's willpower being about as low as you'd expect from a lanky white man who's been propositioned by Jessica Alba, Chuck sets out to "test" the curse, leading to what will inevitably be an embarrassing scene for the woman who was cast to play the fat obstacle Chuck must literally hurdle. The film looks to be a dull, predictable sex comedy.

But the latest round of teasers jettison this story — which, I should probably reiterate, is the film's actual story — in favor of a new plot in which Chuck falls in love with Cam but is put through his paces when she turns out to be a bit of a klutz, whose pratfalls and accidents usually wind up hurting Chuck as much as herself. Observe the recut teaser:

It's not that the new trailer is meant to alter or redirect the film's sexuality: Although the original version deals more plainly with Chuck's quest to get laid and the eventual snag he hits when he discovers he actually has a heart, both teasers are unabashed fans of Jessica Alba's body. But the second teaser softens Chuck up significantly, turning him from a scheming (if ultimately harmless) lothario into a hapless victim of his girlfriend's pratfalls and mishaps. The new version is meant to sell the film as a more palatable, mainstream romantic comedy, something Ben Stiller would make, and move away from the more crass story presented in the original trailer. Chuck is no longer daring himself to sleep with a morbidly obese woman, who's stuffing her face with food the way absolutely no one does, or obsessing over the girl he wants to screw but can't. Now he's just some goofball who has to survive his girlfriend's klutziness.

But, as I said above, that's not the movie. People will see this new teaser and buy into the concept it's selling, only instead of the braindead comedy they expected, they'll receive a crueler movie that has used fellatio and handjob-referencing images to make itself known. And the problem, obviously, isn't that the movie contains sex, or even used sex to sell itself (however disgustingly); it's that Lionsgate is now pretending that a newer, kinder trailer can somehow give them a completely new movie. But maybe I'm overthinking this whole thing. As Alba's character says in the original trailer, "People will believe whatever they want to believe." Maybe the trailers aren't selling two conflicting movies, just different versions of the same idea of a movie, in this case, an R-rated sex comedy starring a dopey comedian and a blandly attractive model. If the target audience doesn't care what kind of movie they're getting, why should they care if the whole thing's a lie?

I created this mix just a couple weeks ago, meaning it came less than two months after the last one, by far the shortest span between mixes so far. Even though I live in L.A., which has a better selection of radio stations than most markets, I find myself listening to CDs almost constantly when I'm in the car. It's not that I don't like modern rock; I enjoy KROQ as much as the next guy, especially the fact that they still feel weirdly obligated to play Sublime every hour. It's just that I get tired of thumbing back and forth between stations, catching snatches of songs I tolerate and trying to avoid commercials. It's easier to listen to albums I love, of which there are many, and to pop in these mixes whenever I make them. As usual, the mix reflects songs I've been listening to for years ("Horses," "The Fox") with songs that are newer to me ("Without Goodbye") or that I'm pleasantly rediscovering after one of those weird dormant periods where you forget you own certain CDs or songs ("Winner's Casino," "In Lieu of Flowers"). Happily, almost all the tracks are available via iTunes, though as always, I recommend picking up the full albums at your local used CD store. Happiness is worth $7 a pop.

Alt 6.0
1. "Horses" (live), Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers — A faster, amped-up version of a track that originally appeared on The Refreshments' The Bottle & Fresh Horses, before Clyne formed his new band. Clyne has since slidden into a bit of artistic disrepair, but this song is a reminder of his country-rock glory days.

2. "W-I-F-E," Old 97's — A solid, swinging song that's made for drinking, or singing in the shower. I choose both. The lesson of the song: When choosing between your wife, your girlfriend, or your rampant alcoholism, always go with the booze.

3. "Pinball Song," Slobberbone — I admit, this song was already on a previous mix. I duped it by accident. But this is my fifth mix, meaning I've cobbled together about 100 songs on these playlists, and sometimes in my eagerness to include a song I really love I forget to check if I've used it before. Sue me.

4. "Winner's Casino," Richmond Fontaine — A great song from a concept album from Richmond Fontaine, meaning it trails off into static and weird ambient noise that doesn't really add to the song and almost detracts from its overall impact (I call this the "mid-period Wilco effect").

5. "Without Goodbye," Two Dollar Pistols — A great, classic-sounding song. Lead singer John Howie, Jr. says "where" like "whar," which kinda reminds me of how my father says "warsh" for "wash." So there you go.

6. "Stickshifts and Safety Belts," Cake — This has been in my head since I was a freshman in college.

7. "Start With Amazing Grace," Zane Williams — Zane Williams has slept on my couch.

8. "Box Full of Letters," Wilco — A.M. is still my favorite Wilco album. I own many of them, and love so many moments on Being There, Summerteeth, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Sky Blue Sky. But I'll always love this one the most. Simple, powerful country-rock.

9. "More Than I Can Do," Steve Earle — There's always an undercurrent of creepiness in songs about pursuing a woman until she's yours, and this one's no exception. I mean, it's a great song, and I Feel Alright is a desert island album, but something about telling a woman you won't leave her yard even if she calls the cops is a little sketchy. (Also, I think this song would be great if you laid it under the scene in the movie where the killer catches up to the victim and murders them. I know that's weird, but admit it, that's a good idea. Somebody at "Dexter" needs to make that happen.)

10. "Back to Me," Kathleen Edwards — Amazing song, and sensual. The way she howls "come" and drags out that vowel ... come on. We all know where you're going with that, Kathleen. And it's awesome.

11. "Jolene," Mindy Smith w/ Dolly Parton — A great cover that gets a boost of credibility (not that Mindy Smith needed it) by having Parton sit in on the harmony.

12. "Bramble Rose," Tift Merritt — It's gonna be okay, Tift.

13. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," Johnny Cash — One of the all-time classic songs, from the last album Cash released before he died.

14. "The Fox," Nickel Creek — This has been in my head since high school.

15. "Casino Queen," Wilco — Everything I said above.

16. "Long Time Gone," Dixie Chicks — I remember the summer this song came out, and how I couldn't get enough of it. I worked for the campus maintenance crew at my college, and it was a generally terrible summer, but while driving the van from the shop to campus, I would listen to the radio and wonder how far I could get if I just stole the van and headed for home.

17. "You Don't Have Far to Go," Merle Haggard — Old, old school, from Hag's first album.

18. "That's All It Took," Gram Parsons — You can never go wrong with Gram Parsons.

19. "In Lieu of Flowers," Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion — The first track on Exploration is the best one. The way Guthrie and Irion blend their harmonies is fantastic.

20. "Fire in the Canyon," Fountains of Wayne — Fountains of Wayne slip into country every now and then, and it always sounds good.

21. "Save It For a Rainy Day," The Jayhawks — An old roommate of mine heard me playing this CD one day and was convinced this song was used in a movie or TV show he'd recently seen, though it wasn't. That's how bright and elemental and good this song is: You will think you've heard it before, but that's because it already exists in your soul, and Gary Louris is just pulling it out. He's good at that.

22. "Cheatin'," Gin Blossoms — New Miserable Experience is a great album, and it's marked halfway through and at the very end by interesting genre exercises that diverge from the rest of the record's early-'90s pop-rock. The first is "Cajun Song" — so, so good — and the second is "Cheatin'," an upbeat, countryish lament that's better than most people give it credit for being. Granted, the chorus is a bit confusing; when the singer explains away his infidelity by saying of his mistress, "She made me feel just like a woman should / You can't call it cheatin' because she reminds me of you," I always wonder, "So, she made you feel like a woman should? So, you feel like a woman?" I think "She made me feel just like a woman could" or "She made me feel just like a man should" would be clearer, but then again, I'm not a suicidal songwriting genius, so what do I know. Regardless, it's a great song.

Upon Seeing A Terrible Artist Named Peaches Perform On "The Henry Rollins Show"
Roommate: "If you just described this to me, without me seeing it, I would say you were lying."

Upon Seeing A Terrible Music Video For "Act Naturally" With Ringo Starr On Some High-Number Video Channel
Me: "This is horrible. This used to be a good song, but this video is kidnapping that song and taking it out in the woods and tying it to a tree and just raping the hell out of it and crapping on it."
Roommate: [Agreeing]"It's kinda bad."
Me: "And then you take the corpse and hollow out the chest cavity with spoons and just fill that with the crap."
Roommate: "Wow."

• I would like to remind you all that it's "Goo goo ga joob" (or "Goo go g'joob"), not "Koo koo ka-choo."

• Definitely didn't expect Evan Rachel Wood to be briefly naked.

• The '60s had great music, but mainly they would've sucked to live through.

• Holy hell, did this movie need to be half an hour shorter.

Click here for the review.

Some classics for the weekend:

I've got another Jesus, Etc. column over at Pajiba.

P.S. Somebody in the comment section asked why I didn't mention Kathy Griffin's "Suck it, Jesus" speech from Saturday's Creative Arts Emmys. The answer: I think Kathy Griffin is unfunny and annoying. Sure, I agree that a lot of artists can cheapen religion when thanking God while accepting an award, and I've seen plenty of weird acceptance speeches in my day. (But you haven't lived until you've heard a tearful Siggie thank God for guiding them to Sing Song victory, which come on, if I was God, I wouldn't care about that at all. At all.) But like I said, Griffin is the polar opposite of humor and intellect, and is only slightly less annoying than being punched in the head, so I didn't want to give her a spot in the column.

This week in the Willamette Week, I take a look at TBS' "My Boys," which is low-key, predictable, and completely watchable. It's not groundbreaking, but it is oddly comforting.

Click here for the column.

P.S. If I were a superhero, I would be Captain Douchebag.

P.P.S. This is somewhat unrelated, but always appropriate:

• I didn't expect to be one of the youngest members of the crowd Saturday night at the Lucinda Williams show, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Lucinda was born in 1953 and started releasing albums in the late 1970s, which not only means she now holds the crown for Oldest Woman I Would Sleep With, but also that she appeals to a slightly older crowd. My concert companion and I are in our mid-20s, which definitely placed us on the younger end of the spectrum. There was an old man in a beret who looked like he could get wild. But he didn't.

• There was a young couple there, not too much older than me, and they were making out like horny juniors at the prom. The guy was your basic indeterminate L.A. douchebag: muscle T, a little too much effort in his casually tousled hair, etc., etc. But the girl was decked out like she'd mistaken an alt-country/rock concert for whatever whore-filled Halloween party she usually attended for a few minutes before slinking off to the guest bedroom to film amateur porn. She was wearing killer heels and a skirt that stopped just below the bottom of her ass, and her man's hand was all over said area while they were making out in the middle of the club and we all waited for the show to start and tried not to stare at the exhibitionist skank with low self-esteem and the skeezy slab of dumbass that was probably getting chlamydia just by breathing this girl's air. They could've stayed home and made out for free, or at least gotten it over with in the car, you know?

• There were also plenty of people who look like me, which is one of the weird psychic pleasures of going to a concert. It's not like a movie, where you're thrown into a room with people whose tastes are likely wildly divergent from yours. Music is a very personal thing, and spending money on a ticket and going to the concert venue guarantees that you'll be around other people who care about your music as much as you do. Everyone is happy to be there and genuinely excited about the artist performing for them. It's a pleasant, warm vibe.

• All that to say I saw a lot of other bearded men in pearl-snaps.

• All week long I'd been wondering what would happen if I got to the concert and Steve Earle happened to be there to play with Lucinda. The concert was part of a five-night series in which she was playing one of her albums in its entirety, and Saturday night was Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Earle played guitar on a few tracks on Car Wheels, as well as doing harmony vocal on "Concrete and Barbed Wire," so I began to entertain a weird daydream/fantasy in which Earle came out and played as a surprise guest, after which I was invited on stage to sing harmony, and then the redhead who'd been standing next to me all night turned out to be an avid reader who hated Cylons.

• Most of that didn't happen.

• But Steve Earle did come out to sit in with Lucinda for pretty much the entire show, which ran for close to three hours. The band did Car Wheels and then took a short break, after which they returned for another set of seven or so songs, followed by an encore of another few tunes. Earle and Lucinda did "You're Still Standing There" from Earle's I Feel Alright, which made me yell for joy like a man on fire. Mike Campbell, guitarist for Tom Petty was also around for a few numbers, including a blistering solo on "Joy." And Jim Lauderdale played guitar and sang backup. And Allison Moorer, who happens to be married to Earle, sang harmony on "Greenville" and several other songs.

• The show also had the coolest souvenir ever: A live recording of the concert made on the spot. After the Car Wheels set, the band took a short break while the CDs were pressed up like mad backstage, and during the second (and third) sets you could saunter over and pick one up for $20. Way better than a shirt, and infinitely longer lasting. The disc is the entire live version of Car Wheels, and it shakes out to about 30 tracks with all the intros and brief stories Lucinda tells before the numbers, as well as the false starts, cheers, and everything else that usually gets polished out of a live album. So now I don't just have a story about the smoking 10-minute version of "Joy," or how Steve Earle leaned back so he could wail the high harmony when he came in on "Concrete and Barbed Wire"; I have the album itself, with those moments intact.

• Damn, but it was an awesome show.

Coworker: Jennifer Hudson is gonna be in the "Sex and the City" movie.
Me: That's gonna be a terrible movie. You know why? Because the TV show wasn't that good.
Coworker: Yeah, but it's got a buttload of fans.
Me: So does NASCAR. Doesn't make it right.

I wish life was a Western.

Click here for the review.

Over at Pajiba, I've got a brief summer wrap-up.

Did I include every film that was released? I did not.
Was that intentional? Yes, it was.

It's just a brief summer recap, people. I talked about a few of the good movies, tried to touch on some of their similar themes, and included a few boxoffice numbers. That's really all I set out to do, and I'm fine with the way it turned out.

Boss: Hey, Dan, are you a basketball person?
Me: Not really, no.
Boss: Are you a sports person?
Me: Only vaguely.
Boss: Oh.
Me: Why, do you have tickets or something?
Boss: No, I'm just reading this story here, and the writer references the NBA All-Star Games, plural.
Me: Yeah, that should be singular.
Boss: Yeah, that's what I thought.
Me: [Brief pause to check Wikipedia, even though I know I'm right, but still live in paranoid fear of being mocked like I was in middle school for not knowing such manly things.] Yeah, there's just one a year.
Boss: Ah. I didn't know if they had them for separate conferences or something.
Me: Doesn't seem so.
Boss: Or I figured they might be segregated.
Me: [Stunned silence.]

[Wherein I recount, for no reason other than sheer boredom and public self-flagellation, the women who provided me with the first clues to the terrible burden of malehood that would one day come to run my life.]

As a boy, I found myself under the sway of subtle hints and longings that were vague harbingers of the terrible change to come. But while I started to really lose my head to hormones around age 11-12, I realize that as a boy I was still somehow fascinated with women, even though I had absolutely no idea what to do with them or why I cared so much. With that confusion in mind, this ongoing list will look at the images that stirred in my youthful chest the rumblings of a manhood that was still a long ways off (and should be here any minute, I assume).

The cover of Career Opportunities
I remember seeing this box on video store shelves and feeling a kind of sweet apoplexy at the sight of Jennifer Connelly. The film came out in 1991, the same year The Rocketeer was released. (1991 was a pretty big year for Jennifer Connelly invading my brain.) I didn't even know that the guy on the Career Opportunities was Frank Whaley, just that I wanted to be Frank Whaley. Boyhood is a weird and confusing time, mainly because everyone keeps telling you that you have it easy, when really your head is full of gauze and you're wary of just what exactly a woman is or what she can do to you. I loved it the way boys love anything, which is to say I was enamored of its curves and awed by its power. Jennifer Connelly would go on to more scandalous roles as her career developed, almost as if some terrible cosmic force was making sure the relative depravity of her roles increased as I aged, so that I went from thinking she was pretty and alluring when I was 9 to seeing things like Mulholland Falls and Requiem for a Dream in high school and wondering what the hell had happened to the babe in the white dress who was saved by the guy in the jetpack. But Career Opportunities will always be how I remember Jennifer Connelly. This video box cover was the perfect image for a 9-year-old boy: Vaguely sexual, but ultimately clean and harmless.

• So, at the end of You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks seems to have a pretty good time engineering his eventual coming together with Meg Ryan, since he knows she's the one he's been emailing and IMing all this time. She, however, doesn't know he's the one she's been communicating with, making the whole thing a little weird and one-sided. In the final scene, she's supposed to meet her online mystery man, only here comes Hanks, and birds are singing, and roses are blooming, and blah blah blah. She gets a little misty and says, "I wanted it to be you." This presents a few problems: (1) She's apparently OK with moving on from the online guy, who she still thinks is someone else, which makes me feel sorry for him, even though he's Hanks, and Hanks just cuckolded a digital version of himself. (2) Hanks will eventually have to come clean about his manipulation, right? Like, 15 minutes later, once the credits have already rolled, they'll probably be tired of sharing an awkward closed-mouth kiss in the middle of the park and decide to talk, and she'll say how glad she is to be in love with him but how bad she feels about screwing over the online guy, at which point Hanks will pretty much have to admit that he's known for a while now that they were communicating online, after which she'll feel violated and weirded out, and a little put off that this amazing man wasn't above rigging the game a little (which is a smart move, but risky, since it would eventually lead to the park bench DTR). I'm just saying, it's a sweet movie, and the end isn't half bad, but there's a fight just around the corner.

• Returning briefly to Back to the Future: Part III, why the hell are Marty and the Doc so scared when they find Doc's tombstone in 1955? He was already an older man when he was transported back to 1885; did they really expect him to never die? He'd be almost 150 years old by 1955. Come on, guys. That's stupid.